Book review.

An Irish Woman Bravely Faces Down Her Past

July 20, 1998|By Reviewed by Jean Patteson, The Orlando Sentinel.

Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

By Nuala O'Faolain

Henry Holt, 215 pages, $21

Before becoming absorbed in this book -- and it is absorbing -- it is useful to know a little about why it was written and how the title came about. Nuala O'Faolain, a columnist for The Irish Times, was asked to put together a collection of her columns and to write a personal introduction. Once she got started on the story of her life, she couldn't stop. This memoir is the result.

Searingly honest, it is a fascinating and inspiring account of one woman's triumph over a daunting heritage of abuse and neglect at home, and of the crippling conservatism of Irish society in the mid-20th Century.

As for the title, O'Faolain explains: "I'm fairly well known in Ireland. I've been on television a lot, and there's a photo of me in the paper, at the top of my column. But I'm no star. People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. . . . `Are you somebody?' they ask."

O'Faolain's public persona is poised and confident. She has rubbed shoulders with some of the leading artists and intellectuals of her time. Her writing is introspective, candid and evocative. But don't for a moment think that the book is a self-indulgent sob story. O'Faolain might have grown up in poverty, one of nine children, with an alcoholic mother and charming, philandering, abusive father. But she never views herself as a victim. Rather, the book is a brave effort to face her past, to understand how it has colored her life and to make an effort to brighten those colors in the future.

As a little girl, Nuala was able to blot out the depression and violence in her impoverished, overcrowded, rural home by escaping into books. Her love of reading was inherited, ironically, from the person who also hurt her most -- her mother, who escaped the realities and responsibilities of her life in books and gin.

By age 14, Nuala is running wild and is sent away to a convent boarding school. She is expelled a couple of years later for too openly expressing the innocent crush she has on an older student. However, the education she has received at this school sets her up for university scholarships in Dublin, then Hull, and finally, in the 1960s, in Oxford.

She flourishes intellectually, but her personal relationships are a disaster. Her aim in life, she says, "was something to do with loving and being loved." Unable to achieve either, she retreats into books and white wine. She is in her late 30s by now, living in London "on the edge of alcoholism." It is at this time that her father dies of leukemia.

"I feel a pang every time I remember that the last he knew of me was those drinking years. He'd be so proud of me now," she writes. "Yet I also believe that it is not a coincidence -- though there were other reasons -- that I started getting healthy when death took him, and a few years later my mother, away from me."

Upon returning to Ireland, she is invigorated by her rediscovery of the culture and natural beauty of her native land. The offer to become a columnist for The Irish Times further boosts her morale. Then comes this book.

One senses that she still yearns for a man, a child, an intimate relationship wherein she can love and be loved. But even without these, her life now has harmony, purpose and peace.